We Couldn't Spare the Two Cents?
effective altruism, foom
The capsule is born in darkness.
A hopper releases a measured dose of retinyl palmitate, suspended in soybean oil, into a softgel encapsulation die. Two ribbons of gelatin, dyed a pale orange the color of a mango’s inner flesh, meet and seal around the droplet. The whole operation takes less than a second. The capsule falls into a drying drum with eighty thousand of its identical siblings, where it rotates for four hours in conditioned air.
The factory around it has no lights on. Light costs money. The machines need none, and there are no humans here to see.
A robotic arm scoops the capsule into a bottle. The bottle joins a case. The case joins a pallet. Somewhere in the building, a ledger updates: per-unit cost, 1.94 cents, which is 2.3 percent above the spot price of the raw inputs. The pallet rolls through a bay door that opens only when a truck backs against it, and the truck has already backed against it, because the truck knew when the pallet would be ready.
The truck drives itself to the airport.
On the tarmac, a supersonic freighter waits with its nose tilted toward a sky that is turning from black to indigo. Its skin is matte and its engines are cold. The pallet is lifted through a belly hatch. Other pallets are already aboard, each labeled with a destination raster: a low-resolution image of a region of the earth, rather than a name, because the jet does not read names. The hatch closes. The engines warm. The jet lifts off and, within twenty minutes of crossing the coast, is cruising at Mach 2.3 over the Atlantic.
The capsule, in its bottle, in its case, on its pallet, does not feel the speed. It is an inert thing. But if a human were there to watch, they would see the cargo hold reconfigure itself in flight. Panels retract. Rails extend. Small drones, each the size of a large dog, clamp onto feed lines and begin to drink the pallets down into their own internal bays.
Twenty-eight capsules are loaded into the drone that will carry this one. The drone is told, in a language of coordinates and weights and infant body-mass estimates, where to go and whom to seek. Its onboard model has been trained on four years of satellite imagery of the target region, updated this morning, cross-referenced against a census that the satellites themselves produced by counting roofs and cook-fires and the small heat signatures of children.
The belly of the jet opens over southern Niger. The drones fall.
For six seconds, the capsule is in freefall inside a falling machine. Then the drone wakes. Its rotors unfold and catch the air with a sound like a held breath released. It levels, orients, and begins to fly west-southwest, losing altitude on a slow glide that will bring it into a village just as the sun clears the acacia line.
The village is called Toungouma, though the drone does not know this. It knows the village as a cluster of twenty-three compounds, forty-one children under the age of five, and twenty-eight of those children flagged by the health ministry as presenting clinical or subclinical vitamin A deficiency. The drone does not know what any of that means to the children. It knows only that its payload of twenty-eight capsules exactly matches the count.
The capsule, in the drone, approaches with the sunrise.
A woman stepping out to start the fire sees it first. She calls into the compound, and her husband comes, and then her sister, and then the old man who is the chief. The chief walks out into the cleared space at the center of the village, adjusts the cloth over his shoulder, and raises his chin. He has seen this before. His people have begun to gather behind him.
The drone descends to twenty meters. A hatch on its underside opens. A small rigid tray lowers on four thin cables, and on the tray sit twenty-eight orange capsules, beaded with condensation from the cold of altitude.
The chief lifts the tray from the cables with both hands.
The drone holds its position for half a second, perhaps reading the weight change, perhaps confirming the handoff by some other sense. Then it tips its nose north and climbs, the sound of its rotors thinning into the morning.
The chief looks down at the capsules in his hands. He looks up once, in the direction the drone has gone, and nods.